2026 is going to be an important year for Xbox Game Studios. The publisher has aligned its four biggest franchises to land within a single calendar year, with new installments to the Fable, Forza, Halo, and Gears franchises readying for release. This all comes as questions swirl around the burgeoning multiplatform strategy and Xbox's decision to cease development of Everwild and Perfect Dark last year.
Coming off the back of yesterday's Xbox Developer Direct, I sat down with Craig Duncan – the head of Xbox Game Studios. Duncan has a lot of great insights to share on the wider Xbox strategy. He led Rare for well over a decade, overseeing the launch of Sea of Thieves and other titles, before taking over as head of XGS in 2024 following the retirement of Alan Hartman.
Xbox Developer Direct Feedback
GamesRadar+: If the Developer Direct demonstrated anything, it's that it is going to be a huge year for Xbox Game Studios. Fable and Forza Horizon 6 were in the showcase, but then you also have Halo: Campaign Evolved and Gears of War: E-Day set to release this year. What does the four tentpole Xbox franchises aligning like this say about XGS' ambitions and intentions in 2026?
Craig Duncan: All of those games have been in my world for the last two years, since coming into this role. It's been pretty incredible to see the shape of these games come together. And now we're in 2026, which is the 25th anniversary of Xbox, where we have our pillar franchises coming together and it's really exciting to finally be able to share more. One of the best things we get to do as game makers is share the passion and excitement for what we're building with the world.
It's great to have a moment like the Developer Direct to start the year, and I'm really happy that the teams – Playground and Double Fine, particularly – are able to actually share what they've been working on. And then as we go through the rest of the year, there will be other moments where we share more with what's going on with Gears, and obviously Halo had its announcement last year. I love that we have a portfolio that has everything from Forza to Fable, Halo to Kiln to Keeper, the Obsidian RPGs that we released last year to inXile's Clockwork Revolution. We have a fantastic portfolio.
GR+: This generation has really been defined by the quality of its RPGs. Playground has never built a fantasy-action RPG before. Was it a risk them taking on Fable?
Craig Duncan: When I think about Playground and their history with the Forza Horizon franchise, and their desire to take on Fable as a franchise, I think it's really about this relentless pursuit of excellence.
We all know what that means in Forza Horizon, we've all seen that franchise get bigger and bigger every year, but what does that mean for Fable? I have played a bunch of the game, I've messed around with the combat and the Living Population, and it's just mind blowing. I'm so excited that we talked about it in the Developer Direct, because it's something that people wouldn't expect.
GR+: In terms of Playground taking on the challenge of a new franchise, or just the way the Fable revival is building on the past?
Craig Duncan: There were some really special ideas in the original Fable trilogy, but what I think Playground has done is take some of these ideas and modernized them – my brain pops every time I think about the Living Population, how it works, and what it adds to the overall game; it's an incredible invention, and Fable is going to be an incredible RPG. It will be amazing to see what players do with it, and it'll be massively shareable. I love when we make things I'm excited to play as a player.
GR+: Which is probably a good time for us to pivot to Kiln. A quintessentially weird game from Double Fine. How does the studio fit into the Xbox Game Studios group?
Craig Duncan: I think it's always interesting how games start and how they turn into the games that we ultimately take to market. And sure, there are game ideas that never see the light of day – there are probably ideas that happen in the team that don't even make it to me, and that's fine as well. But all of our teams are different, whether it's Double Fine or Rare or World's Edge making Age of Empires. All of our teams are unique studios, and we want to encourage them to make things that are differentiated – that represent their ideas and their passions.
When I think about 'differentiated', Double Fine is definitely at the top of the list. Whether it's ideas that come from their Amnesia Fortnight, whether they have a creator like Lee [Petty] that's got a game he really wants to make – which is where Keeper came from – or whether it's just Tim [Schafer] saying, 'hey, Craig, next time you come to Double Fine do you want to play a multiplayer pottery party brawler?' And I have to say, 'I mean, I don't know what that is, but sure!' And then we just spend the whole time grinning ear-to-ear while we're playing it. I think we have something really special there.
Image credit: Xbox Game Studios
Image credit: Xbox Game Studios
GR+: With new Fable, Forza, Gears, and Halo games set to land this year, how do you see something like Kiln factoring into your plans and priorities?
Craig Duncan: My job, and the ambition of the organization, is: how do we get Kiln to as many players as we can? To help the ideas of the team reach as much success as they can? We are one of the biggest video game publishers in the world. So how do we make the ideas from our teams reach as many people as possible, with games of all different shapes and sizes? I think that's important.
GR+: We'll get to the number of games XGS is publishing in a minute, but I just wanted to touch back on the origins of Kiln. Live service games have become so dominant in the landscape, but you're saying that Double Fine pursuing multiplayer wasn't a mandate from Xbox but rather a good idea worth supporting?
Craig Duncan: For Kiln specifically, that's absolutely a Double Fine idea and a Double Fine creation. It really wasn't much different than what I just said, they called me up and asked if I wanted to come play a multiplayer party pottery brawler [laughs].
"It was very much their idea, but it's probably something that maybe they couldn't have realized without us"
Craig Duncan, head of Xbox Game Studios
But we then get the benefit of going, okay, so this is an online game? And it's a game that – and I don't want to talk about the team's plans – you can expect to see what you see in online games, which is that there will probably be some sort of test or beta where we can have players in to make sure that it all works. Well, we have teams that we can lean on with that.
GR+: As in, how Double Fine could collaborate with other studios within Xbox?
Craig Duncan: One of the first things I said to Double Fine was, 'Hey, go speak to the Rare team, see what they experienced with Sea of Thieves, and work with them.' So our teams are connecting all of the time. Playground works super closely with Turn 10 on all of the ForzaTech, which underpins both Fable and Forza Horizon. The Coalition, who is doing Gears of War, works across all of our teams that use Unreal Engine 5. So to bring it back to Kiln: It was very much their idea, but it is probably something that maybe they couldn't have realized without us, but we can connect them to the teams that have some of the experience to help them really achieve their ambitions.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM 2025
GR+: By my count, Xbox Game Studios published six first-party games, one into Early Access, two from third-party studios, and six on PS5 in 2025. 2026 sounds similarly stacked. After a generation spent grappling with the narrative that 'Xbox has no games' is it gratifying to deliver such strong lineups?
Craig Duncan: When you were just reciting all of the things we did last year – and I said something similar to this in the note I sent out to the teams at the beginning of 2026 – I just feel so incredibly proud of everything we shipped last year.
I think we shipped 15 unique projects coming out of XGS. Some were single-platform, some were multi-platform… I think if you were to compare us to any studios group in the world in terms of our output, we ship more games in more places to a higher quality than XGS has ever done. So I feel very proud of that.
GR+: I'm not surprised! Although I will say that I thought Xbox's release calendar was a little congested. XGS releases three games in August and three in October, for example.
Craig Duncan: We had some moments where we were probably on top of ourselves. If I think back to October, we had Ninja Gaiden 4, The Outer Worlds 2, Keeper…
GR+: And then the ROG Xbox Ally handhelds and the Halo: Campaign Evolved announcement on top of all that.
Craig Duncan: Yeah [laughter]. Like, all of those games that I just mentioned are incredible games. We went into that period going, okay, we think they are all for different people. The weird but chill (as Tim describes it) Keeper is different to the hyper-fast combat in Ninja Gaiden 4, which is different to the wonderful world Obsidian brought to life in The Outer Worlds 2. They are different, but it's still a bunch of games releasing within a short window of time between each other.
"We ideally want to space things out and make sure games have their own oxygen"
Craig Duncan, head of Xbox Game Studios
GR+: Has this experience helped you recalibrate Xbox's release schedule for 2026?
Craig Duncan: I think that we ideally want to space things out and make sure games have their own, as we like to call it, oxygen in those moments. It's just super busy. Our own release schedule is one thing, but then you have everyone else's release schedule at the same time.
There are very few windows and there's more and more games, and more competition for a player's time. There's also movies, music, and all this other stuff as well that gets packed in. So the learning was this: let's not put stuff on top of our stuff, and I think we have done that. Let our games have a bit of oxygen, even though it's always busy and there's never really a free time to launch something.
GR+: Speaking of oxygen being taken out of the calendar, how are you feeling about the release of Grand Theft Auto 6 – which obviously got delayed to November. Is GTA 6 impacting Xbox's plans, or is it not something you're thinking about?
Craig Duncan: I mean, it's more that they're going to do what they're going to do. My job is to do what we should do for the best of our games. So yeah, we don't… there's always other games, and there's always other things we have to consider.
Image credit: Xbox Game Studios
Image credit: Rare
GR+: Xbox Game Studios made the decision to shut down The Initiative and its Perfect Dark reboot, and end development of Rare's Everwild in 2025. These titles spent almost seven years in the public consciousness, longer in development. Did Xbox learn any key lessons about how early it announces projects or how it tracks key production milestones after going through this difficult process?
Craig Duncan: Those things are really tough to do. If we make any changes to our business that affect people in their jobs, that is really tough. I just want to be honest and transparent with you – I wouldn't go into individual projects, just because there were people that worked on those games and put their heart and soul into them. But, as an overall portfolio, we're always looking at how everything is going. At whether everything is set up well. At whether we have got the right resources to go and deliver on our aspirations for all of our games.
And we made some difficult choices; some of that is the job of managing a games portfolio and a number of studios. All I would also say as well, is that it doesn't lessen anything from any of those people that did really great work on those games. Sometimes business decisions have to be made, which have wide reach and impact. We don't like doing that. So the lesson is: how do we make sure we don't have to do that? That's really the goal there.
Why More Xbox Games Are Going to PS5
GR+: Xbox ported six titles to PS5 in 2025, and there's plenty more set for 2026. How are you determining when to bring XGS games to other platforms?
Craig Duncan: As the guy that gets to run studios and help our game teams, I take a pretty simple view on this: we want our games to reach the most players that we can. I have been on this journey before…
You know, I was running Sea of Thieves at Rare when we took it to PS5, and as we migrated from Xbox to PC to PlayStation, we saw more players come in and we saw the community around the game grow. Forza Horizon 5, which launched on PS5 last year, did really, really well. It helped the community around that game grow – it gives everybody more people to play with. For me, this strategy is really about how we can have our games reach as many people as they can.
GR+: Something I've always been a little confused by is the consistency of that strategy. We see, for example, Fable and Kiln land day-and-date on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X, whereas the PlayStation port of Forza Horizon 6 is scheduled for after launch.
Craig Duncan: There's always development realities about when these projects start – how big a team is, and what plans we have at the start of development. Like you said, when a strategy changes, maybe you've got a plan that exists with a game and maybe you can adopt that, maybe you can't. So that's why. And to be clear, this is totally fair feedback. Sometimes we are inconsistent. You see some games in one place, some games in multiple places. Just know that we're going to work on that, and we're going to try and be more consistent with what we do.
But you know, for our game makers, if you're on the Fable team you just want as many people who love Fable to appreciate the great work that the team's doing. That's always our goal. It's rarely more complicated than that. It's like, how can we get this game to as many players as we can?
GR+: Would you like to see XGS get to a place where all of its first-party releases are landing across other platforms from day one?
Craig Duncan: My number one job is to help our teams be successful. If I think about my role, some of that is optionality about what we do and what we approach. You used the word 'port' before, and not to sort of pick you up on that word specifically, but wherever our games show up we want them to show up and be the best that they can be for that platform. So we want to take advantage of whatever features and nuances that the platform has.
"We just want to do the best job, by each platform, by each game"
Craig Duncan, head of Xbox Game Studios
So that may lead to a bit of optionality. Which is to say, if we're only in a position to release a game on a platform and not have it show up really well? Then I think we wouldn't do that. I think we would have a conversation internally and go, 'Hey, unless we can do it really well and do the right thing by those players, then…' and that's when you get into conversations of, well, maybe we can ship it afterwards.
Because teams are only a set size. We only have a certain amount of… ultimately, it all comes down to resource. Not everything is limitless. So we just want to do the best job, by each platform, by each game. So in that world, sometimes we'll maintain optionality. Some games we might go PC first, others we might go console first. Grounded 2 is a really good example of this, which we launched into Game Preview, Steam, and PC initially. So yeah, I think it won't always be the same.
GR+: We are running out of time, so my last question is about what place you believe Xbox Game Studios holds in the wider Xbox organization as it approaches its 25th anniversary, given how much has changed in that time?
Craig Duncan: We have a number of different studios that all have different capabilities, strengths, and creative forces. We have evolving games. We have big franchises. We have smaller studios. We have RPG houses like Obsidian and we have craftsman houses like Ninja Theory. When I think about that breadth, our XGS studios really can go and do anything. And when I think about our games showing up in different places, I think our set of studios could actually go do a bunch of different things on a bunch of different platforms, and just go create a variety of games and experiences for people. We always focus on creativity, always focus on craft. But I think that it's that eclectic mix of studios and teams that really is the strength of Xbox Game Studios, one that separates us from a lot of other studio groups.
GR+: Okay, and lastly lastly… do you think we will see more of State of Decay 3 this year?
Craig Duncan: I think the [PR] in this room will murder me if I give you the answer to that. So, here's what I'll say: I have done a number of visits to that studio in the last six to eight months. I have sat and played the game with the team a bunch of times. It's coming on really well. We're very excited about the franchise and its potential. So I will certainly see a lot more of it in the coming year… is that a good answer to your question? [laughter]
Discover the Xbox games that will be Big in 2026
With Xbox preparing for its biggest year of the console generation so far, we are previewing its most anticipated first-party games (and some key Game Pass releases) as part of our Big in 2026 Spotlight series. Join us every day this week for exclusive interviews, new previews, and fresh insights into all of the upcoming Xbox games you need to have on your radar.
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